Bookslut

September 2008

"The detective is a great buffer and a guide through a novel. I found that with this book, as well, I experienced it firsthand, not just as a reader but as a writer: The detective protected me from the worst horrors of the case, and by seeing it through his eyes, and following his investigation, it could remain a legitimate investigation, rather than wallowing in horror, madness, and all the rest of it, and I realized that that was part of the role of the detective, and part of the containing and comforting thing about detective fiction. The moral purpose that goes through the whole thing -- without the detective, you may not have it."
by
Jason B. Jones

"Written during what some considered apocalyptic times not unlike the present day, I imagine that Unguentine's decision to take to sea was a response to the then-state of the world. Yes, there are ecological elements. At the time of writing the novel I was fiercely interested in back-to-the land technologies and I certainly felt that urban living of the sort I had known most of my adult life was as we say now unsustainable. During that time Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog was my bible."
by
Sean P. Carroll

No art is worth the death of a child or the confinement of a people, but all art is the testament of at least one spirit’s pilgrimage to freedom. He wouldn’t deny the genius of certain "capon preists" of literature, the comfortable, plumped-up Prousts and Whartons and Henry Jameses. But they were anomalies, place-holders, blue sky "filler space" in the landscape canvas of the human imagination. Like the young Einstein, warming his hands before an oil lamp and inventing algebras on the backs of rejected patent applications (his only paper), Solzhenitsyn echoed the Swiss clerk’s edict: "the things for which we remember a man are done in the dark and cold."
by
Richard Wirick

"It is kind of disappointing to learn that some people shut themselves off from YA work -- mine or anyone's -- in the belief that there's nothing there for an adult reader, could by definition be nothing there. We all need a nudge out of our readerly comfort zones and I would love to be the gateway drug for people who haven't read any YA before. First taste is free, folks."
by
Geoffrey H. Goodwin

Buddhist Hanh isn’t a run-of-the-mill environmental activist. He stresses a need to change ourselves as a prerequisite to changing the Earth’s health: “The world is sick, and adapting to an unwell environment cannot bring real health. Many people who need psychotherapy are really victims of modern life which separates us from each other and from the rest of the human family.” (And in other places, he notes, from all of nature.) The bottom line is this: “Our mental health requires that the effort for us to recover our humanness should be given priority.”
by
Barbara J. King

"My parents originally opened a printing business in the Fillmore District of San Francisco -- Success Printing. Then they began to publish works by Black authors and poets as well as out-of-print literature they deemed essential reading, such as The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey and Stolen Legacy by George G.M. James. In 1960, they began selling books out of the printing storefront. When the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency began “redeveloping” Blacks out of San Francisco, devastating the self-contained and vibrant Fillmore District, many Black families moved to the East Bay and my parents opened a second store in Oakland in 1976."
by
Gili Warsett

When I was eleven or twelve, I used to delve into magazines like Seventeen, Sassy, Glamour and Mademoiselle with delight. I was 100% sure that they would save me, by teaching me to be beautiful and thin and popular and confident. I would learn from them what to wear and how to kiss and who to be. Even then, the articles were too vague and not specific enough. I wanted really precise instructions: “How to get up tomorrow morning and look like Claudia Schiffer and have Jeremy fall in love with you and want to kiss you and take you to the movies, and what to wear, and how not to completely humiliate yourself.”
by
Elizabeth Bachner

"The fact is that nobody knows anything about these tribes, who were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BC and subsequently “lost” -- possibly assimilated into the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, possibly absorbed into other regional populations, possibly secretly surviving intact and waiting for the arrival of the Messiah. Any scholarship is purely speculative and tends to reflect attitudes of the author. The Reverend John Austen, for example, etymologized “Saxons” to “Sac’s Sons” or “sons of Isaac,” such that the English would be the true descendents of the lost Israelites."
by
Sarah Burke